Category: personal growth

They Thanked Me for My Service. I Was Begging Them for Help.

I spent nearly half my life as a proud public servant. Twenty-six and a half years, to be exact.

How do you explain being a woman who proudly dedicated more than twenty-six years of her life to serving the people of Arkansas, only to find herself fighting the very government she spent her career serving?

How do you explain going from being a confident, respected professional to spending approximately nine months isolated in a windowless room?

How do you explain providing medical documentation, requesting reasonable accommodations, following procedures, and eventually seeking help from the highest office in the state, only to continue feeling unheard?

And perhaps the most important question of all:

Who protects the people who find the courage to speak up?

I used to believe that if I fought hard enough, someone at the top would care. That if the Governor of Arkansas knew what was happening inside the walls of one of her agencies, she would say, “Enough.”

But how would she know?

When an employee repeatedly asks for help, how far do those concerns travel? Who is responsible for ensuring they reach someone with the authority to act?

I didn’t know.

I still don’t know exactly what reached Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders personally.

What I do know is that I spent more than twenty-six years serving the State of Arkansas, and when I desperately needed someone to help me, I found myself fighting to be heard.

The Woman I Used to Be

I was proud of my work.

I appreciated the citizens I served, the relationships I established, and the taxpayers whose contributions paid my salary.

I believed in the rule of law and doing what was right.

I never assumed doing the right thing would always be easy. I asked questions. I challenged decisions. I wasn’t always the easiest person to agree with.

But I believed that when something wasn’t right, we had a responsibility to fix it.

On December 11, 2023, I experienced a sexual assault during my lunch break.

I reported what happened.

I never could have imagined that the events and decisions that followed would nearly destroy the woman I had spent a lifetime becoming.

I was transferred away from the workplace and county I called home, away from the community I had watched grow and helped serve for decades.

The professional relationships, responsibilities, and identity I had spent years building were suddenly changed.

Eventually, I was placed in a small, windowless workspace that I came to call “the box.”

For approximately nine months, there were no windows, no ordinary conversations with coworkers, no stopping by someone’s desk, and none of the everyday human interactions most people never give a second thought.

I was still an employee.

I still had a job to do.

But the physical circumstances of my workplace meant I could no longer interact with the community the way I once had.

Nobody had to explicitly tell me I was forbidden from seeing people.

The arrangement itself prevented those interactions.

Whether complete isolation was the intention or not, I lived with its consequences.

And I began losing the woman I had once been so proud to be.

The Agency That Was Supposed to Protect

There is an irony I have struggled to understand.

The Arkansas Department of Health is an agency whose mission centers on protecting the health and well-being of the people of Arkansas.

It works to protect children, promote public health, and connect people with resources during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.

We encourage people experiencing violence to seek help.

We tell people struggling with their mental health that their lives matter.

We promote prevention, intervention, and support.

Yet I was an employee of that very agency, trying desperately to recover from trauma while believing that the circumstances of my employment were making my recovery more difficult.

I provided medical documentation.

I requested accommodations.

I sought extensive treatment.

I followed procedures and continued performing my duties.

All while trying to hold on to the professional identity I had spent decades building.

I couldn’t understand how an agency dedicated to protecting people’s health could leave one of its own employees feeling so unprotected.

I couldn’t understand why the principles we promoted to the public seemed so difficult to find when I needed them myself.

And I couldn’t understand why I had to fight so hard simply to continue working while trying to heal.

A Governor Who Speaks of Families and Mental Health

As a woman and a mother, I have listened to Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders speak about the importance of families, children, and mental health.

I have watched policies change to provide benefits to mothers that were not available to me when my own children were born.

I am glad that mothers today have opportunities and protections that women before them did not receive.

Progress matters.

But I also know what it feels like to be a mother, a woman, and a longtime public employee whose needs seemed to fall somewhere outside those public commitments.

How can we advocate for mental health while allowing employees to struggle under working conditions they believe are harming their recovery?

How can we encourage women to speak up about violence while leaving those who do speak up feeling abandoned?

How can we say families matter without recognizing what happens to an entire family when one person is struggling simply to survive another day?

These are not questions I ask because I oppose progress.

I ask them because I believe those values should apply to everyone.

Including the people who serve the government itself.

They Thanked Me for My Service

Eventually, I reached out to Governor Sanders’s office.

More than once.

I wanted someone to understand what had happened to me.

Not simply that I was unhappy with my job.

Not that I disagreed with a supervisor.

But that I had experienced a sexual assault, that my life had changed, and that I was desperately trying to recover while continuing to serve the state.

I later received a response from the Governor’s office.

It thanked me for my service.

And I want to be fair about that.

Someone responded.

Someone acknowledged my years of public employment.

But what I needed was more than acknowledgment.

I needed to know whether anyone had examined the circumstances I was describing.

Whether anyone had questioned how an employee with decades of service, medical documentation, and requests for accommodation had reached such a desperate point.

Whether anyone was willing to look beyond the correspondence and see the human being behind it.

The response did not provide those answers.

I cannot say what Governor Sanders personally knew or whether she ever read my letters.

But I can tell you what receiving that acknowledgment felt like.

They thanked me for my service. I was begging them for help.

And those are two very different things.

When Being Heard Becomes Another Battle

There is something particularly painful about trying to explain suffering to an institution through paperwork.

You learn to document everything.

Dates.

Conversations.

Medical appointments.

Requests.

Responses.

You become increasingly skilled at describing what happened while becoming increasingly exhausted by the need to explain it.

At some point, you begin to wonder how many times a person must ask for help before the request becomes something more than another document in another file.

I had spent my career believing in procedures, regulations, and accountability.

I knew why those systems existed.

But I also began to understand something I had never fully appreciated before.

A person can follow every procedure available to them and still feel completely powerless.

And the emotional consequences of that experience do not disappear simply because someone sends a polite letter.

Trauma changes how you experience the world.

It changes how sounds feel to your nervous system.

It changes your confidence, your concentration, your relationships, and sometimes even your willingness to leave your home.

Perhaps one of the hardest parts is remembering exactly who you used to be while desperately trying to understand why you cannot simply become that person again.

I missed her.

The woman who could walk into difficult situations without fear.

The woman who could challenge a decision and look someone directly in the eye.

The woman who believed she could make a difference.

I wondered whether I would ever find her again.

For too long, I wasn’t really living.

I was surviving until tomorrow.

And then trying to survive until the tomorrow after that.

Something Began to Change

Somewhere during that struggle, I began putting my experiences into words.

I began turning my pain into stories and art.

Not simply to describe what had happened to me, but because I wanted other people to recognize something of themselves in what I was writing.

The people carrying pain the world cannot see.

The people expected to continue functioning while their minds and bodies are struggling to survive.

The people who have been told to speak up, only to discover how difficult being heard can become.

I am not an angel.

I am not a saint.

And I am certainly not fearless.

But through all of it, one thing remained.

I still showed up.

I showed up even while afraid.

I showed up when I felt exhaustion in every fiber of my being.

I showed up when it would have been easier to disappear and allow my story to scatter into the wind like dandelion seeds.

Not because I had conquered every symptom or erased everything that happened.

But because I was beginning to understand that what happened to me does not get to decide the person I will become.

More Than an Acknowledgment

Somewhere along this journey, I began to recognize that this story was no longer just about me.

It was about every employee who has ever been afraid to report something wrong.

Every survivor of sexual assault who has questioned whether speaking up is worth the consequences that may follow.

Every person who has followed the rules, asked for help, and found themselves fighting a system they believed should protect them.

If this can happen to someone with decades of public service, professional expertise, medical documentation, and the determination to stand up for herself, what happens to the employee, the survivor, or the person who is too afraid to speak?

That is the question I cannot walk away from.

And it is why I want something more than an acknowledgment.

I am fighting for change.

I want protections that do not depend on how persistent an employee is or how many times they have to beg someone to listen.

I want meaningful accountability when a public employee reports an assault and subsequently experiences isolation, loss of professional responsibilities, or serious difficulties obtaining necessary accommodations.

I want independent oversight so employees are not left relying entirely on the institutions whose decisions they are questioning.

I want a system where seeking help does not become another battle that consumes years of someone’s life.

I want Melissa’s Law.

Not because I believe a law can erase what happened to me.

It can’t.

A law cannot give me back the nights I spent afraid, the months I spent isolated, or the pieces of myself I have struggled so hard to recover.

But perhaps it can help prevent someone else from experiencing the same thing.

Perhaps it can help ensure that the next person who finds the courage to speak up receives something more than a letter thanking them for their service.

Because public service should never require sacrificing your humanity.

And reporting an assault should not mean spending the following years fighting to recover your identity.

Becoming Heard

For more than twenty-six years, I served the people of Arkansas.

When I needed someone to protect the dignity and humanity I had spent my career extending to others, I found myself fighting to be heard.

I cannot change December 11, 2023.

I cannot recover every day I spent fighting to survive.

But I can decide what happens next.

For too long, all I was trying to do was survive until tomorrow.

Now, I want to believe in myself walking into tomorrow.

I have spent years trying to make people understand what happened to me.

Today, I want people to understand why it matters for everyone.

Because somewhere there is another employee afraid of losing a career. Another survivor wondering whether anyone will believe them. Another person who has convinced themselves that remaining silent is safer than asking for help.

Their voices matter.

Their dignity matters.

Their health matters.

And they deserve more than an acknowledgment.

They thanked me for my service.

I was begging them for help.

Now, I am demanding change.

The Woman in the Flowered Nightgown

–An Unexpected Journey Back to Belonging–

Saturday morning, I looked at my daughter and told her something I hadn’t been able to believe about myself for a very long time.

I deserve a seat at the table.

I didn’t know that before the morning was over, I would find myself sitting on a stranger’s couch, in a neighborhood I’d watched grow from almost nothing, remembering what it felt like to belong.

But first, I had to convince myself to leave the house.

–The Morning After Friday Night Lights–

The night before had been difficult.

I’d driven an hour and a half to Greenwood, Arkansas, to watch my son play football. A year earlier, I couldn’t have made that trip. My nervous system was so devastated that I could barely leave my own property, much less tolerate a stadium filled with screaming students, marching bands, fireworks, and flashing lights.

I’d forgotten my Loop earbuds. Again.

The traffic down the mountain had already sent my nervous system into fight mode, and the stadium only added to the overwhelming stimulation.

Yet somewhere in that difficult evening, something beautiful happened.

A woman sitting nearby gently touched my leg and asked if I recognized her.

I didn’t recognize her face immediately, but I recognized the kindness in her hand.

She was the therapist from my first art class through the Northwest Arkansas Center for Sexual Assault, one of the first places I began finding my voice again after so much isolation.

Of all the people who could have been sitting beside me that night, there was someone who had helped me begin returning to the world.

We arrived home late, exhausted, and I struggled to sleep knowing what I had committed myself to doing the following morning.

The irony was that I had volunteered to go canvassing for Tim Shepherd, one of the candidates running for Washington County Judge.

Which, in all honesty, was something I’d never chosen to participate in before.

And my mind desperately wanted to talk me out of it.

I Knew I Could. I Just Didn’t Know If I Had It in Me to Actually Follow Through with doing it.

I had spent 26 and a half years working in state regulatory government, you wouldn’t think knocking on a stranger’s door would seem difficult.

Over the span of my career, my normal job duties required walking onto people’s properties, answering uncomfortable questions, explaining complicated regulations, resolving internal and external conflicts, and sometimes informing people about things they really didn’t want to hear.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to talk to people.

My reality is that I have a master’s degree in conflict resolution. I have an educational background in how to communicate effectively, especially when situations become uncomfortably tense.

But now that I live with CPTSD, things have changed.

The neurological effects of trauma have changed how I respond to conflict and stress, causing me to question the reality I once knew.

The idea of a positive interaction didn’t frighten me.

It was the possibility of a negative one.

What if someone became angry?

What would I do if something got heated?

Could I control my responses?

Was I capable of recognizing when I might need to remove myself from a particular situation?

Saturday morning, I got up and headed out anyway.

I quickly got ready and chose to put on a sweater covered in hearts, my red pants, and the red boots I’d worn the night before because, quite frankly, they were easy to find.

My house and my life still feel like one giant cluster of chaos. There are times when I still struggle as I try to pull myself out of old habits and back into the land of the living.

It was at that moment that I looked at my daughter, December, and explained why I wanted to participate.

I deserved a seat at the table.

I had spent 26 and a half years caring for the citizens of Washington County. I knew its people, its growth, its history, and I cherished the relationships that had developed over decades.

I didn’t know whether this experience would lead to anything professionally.

That was not my goal.

I simply wanted those years when I had been seen as someone valuable to mean something beyond my past.

I wanted to choose what I was allowed to contribute.

I wanted a choice in how I became part of my community again.

–Finding My Place at the Table–

I arrived two minutes late.

Nothing unusual. It is something of a running joke with my family.

There were about a dozen volunteers gathered in the parking lot, most of whom I’d never met.

Tim greeted me by name and shook my hand.

People were introducing themselves, discussing assignments, and demonstrating a canvassing app that fascinated me.

It was remarkable to see how technology had changed the process of reaching voters.

But as the instructions continued, I realized they expected us to go knocking on doors individually.

My stomach sank.

As uncomfortable as it was, I had to explain that I needed someone with me.

I have learned through this process that sometimes my comfort has to come first.

Explaining the kind of fear CPTSD can create to someone who hasn’t experienced it is difficult.

Fortunately, everyone understood, and assignments were made so we could share districts and canvass together.

It was decided that we’d met a little too early on Saturday morning, so we chose to gather at a coffee shop before heading into the neighborhoods to start knocking on doors.

The coffee shop just so happened to be the same one where I’d previously spent an hour and a half talking with Tim a few months earlier.

That brought some much-needed relief to my anxiety.

Meeting Tim in June was one of the first times someone outside my workplace helped me recognize the side of myself that had almost been extinguished by the multiple transfers and removal of job duties I’d experienced since 2024.

Knowing your surroundings helps when you suffer from CPTSD.

New places can wreak havoc on an already overwhelmed nervous system.

That decision alone made a huge difference in the outcome of the rest of my day.

I ordered a chai and a scone, even though I was too anxious to really enjoy either one.

The group had already chosen a table in the middle of the room.

The irony of living with CPTSD is that you desperately want to feel in control of your surroundings, yet here I was, trying to figure out where I could sit to ease my nervous system.

My first choice was to attempt to sit with my back to the door.

I quickly realized how uncomfortable that made me.

So I repositioned myself with my back toward the wall.

When your nervous system has spent years expecting danger, even choosing where to sit requires thought.

There I sat.

By choice.

No longer hidden.

I was earning my seat.

At a table with people who hoped to serve Washington County, Arkansas, my pride and joy.

I got to have real discussions with Hayden Hill, a young man running for county treasurer, and a tall, well-spoken college student with blond hair and glasses who looked closer to 30 than 19.

He was a University of Arkansas student interested in becoming a criminal attorney someday.

As we spoke, I told him I never would have guessed he was 19.

His response was comical.

“I wish the bouncers at the club believed the same.”

That made me laugh, and memories of a lifetime ago, including my own underage visits to clubs, flashed through my mind.

Our conversations allowed me to learn about their backgrounds and aspirations.

I discussed my three degrees, including my master’s degree in conflict resolution, and the years I’d spent working in Washington County.

I talked about being an outsider who had been invited into county government discussions by some of the most respected county judges of the past 30 years.

I had promised myself I wouldn’t share my trauma history.

I don’t want it to be what defines me.

Unfortunately, to explain how I got where I am today, I sometimes have to share enough of my story for people to understand why being included at that table mattered so much.

I’ve gotten good at not sharing the graphic details.

Over the last almost three years, I’ve practically perfected the ability to explain what happened without sharing everything I’ve endured.

I’ve become fluent in sharing just enough for someone to understand the shocking extent of the damage I’ve experienced, and why I care so deeply about the county and humanity in general.

In my experience, my story touches the majority of people I choose to share it with.

The response is almost always the same.

People begin telling me how sorry they are for what happened to me.

It isn’t that I don’t appreciate compassion.

That’s not it at all.

I need the compassion.

But I also want people to see me beyond what happened to me and how my employer reacted.

I want to be seen as someone who still has something to contribute to society.

–The First Doors–

Eventually, we all headed to the same subdivision so those of us who were new to canvassing could have someone with us.

It was a neighborhood I knew.

I’d inspected its swimming pool during my years working for the state.

Three of us started walking together while the others went in different directions.

Not that it’s particularly relevant, but we were the three women in the group.

I knew I was out of my comfort zone, so I allowed the other two women, who were more seasoned in canvassing, to lead us.

At that point, all I wanted to do was observe.

That was about all my nervous system would allow.

At one of the first houses, a gentleman came out who seemed cautious about our approach and why we were there.

He asked pointed political questions, including whether Tim supported Donald Trump.

He identified himself as a die-hard Democrat.

And here I was, standing there as someone who had been a registered Democrat most of my life, volunteering for a candidate running on the Republican ticket.

Most people would probably question that choice.

I chose a campaign, not a party.

Because of that political affiliation, I suddenly felt drawn to explain why I believed Tim was the most qualified candidate for the job.

I gave my perspective.

I explained that my years in government had taught me to look beyond party labels and consider the individual.

I shared why I believed Tim’s experience and approach to public service deserved consideration.

The gentleman listened.

He said he’d look into it.

And we moved on.

To my astonishment, there had been no argument.

No confrontation.

No need for fear.

My body was starting to relax.

The old me was beginning to reemerge.

I had spoken with someone who held strong political opinions, and we’d simply had a conversation.

Something that once came naturally to me was beginning to feel possible again.

And as my body began to ease, the canvassing continued.

But the most meaningful conversation of the day was still waiting around the corner.

–The Woman in the Flowered Nightgown–

We knocked on another door, and a gentleman answered.

His wife was saying something from inside the house.

At first, he seemed to think she wanted him to close the door.

But that wasn’t what she was saying.

She wanted to hear what we had to say.

A few moments later, she made her way to the doorway with her walker.

She invited all three of us inside.

Her home was beautiful. Immaculate. The kind of home that reminded me of my own mother.

Her husband offered us water, and she invited us to sit on the couch.

I sat closest to her.

She was wearing a flowered nightgown, the kind that honestly looked more like one of the little dresses young women wear these days.

She apologized for her appearance.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand why she was apologizing.

I understood it all too well.

When you feel insecure, sometimes the first thing you do is apologize for the shortcomings you believe other people might see.

But in my eyes, she was absolutely beautiful.

There is something to be said about beauty and aging. About the grace of a woman who has lived a life and shouldn’t have to apologize for being comfortable in her own home.

She told us she’d been ill and had undergone surgery.

She wasn’t sure she’d be able to get out to vote and thought she might need a mail-in ballot.

But she wanted to hear about the candidates.

She wanted to participate.

And that’s when something inside me began to open.

I started talking about Washington County.

Not from a political script.

Not from a campaign advertisement.

But from 26 and a half years of watching a community grow.

I spoke about the changes I’d witnessed, the responsibilities of public service, and why integrity mattered so deeply to me.

I gave my explanation of why I’d chosen to support someone whose approach to leadership I believed in.

For the first time that morning, I wasn’t thinking about whether I could speak to a stranger.

I felt drawn into a conversation with someone whose perspective I wanted to understand.

Someone I wanted to show kindness to.

Someone I wanted to share something meaningful with.

About something I loved.

At one point, she looked down at Hayden’s campaign card.

“Now, he’s a nice-looking young man,” she said.

I smiled and agreed.

That gave me an opening to explain what I’d just learned earlier about Hayden Hill and why I believed he would be a good fit for the position he was running to fill.

Somewhere during that conversation, I noticed a tiny tear in this lady’s eyes.

I’m not sure why it was there.

Perhaps she was emotional about her health.

Perhaps she appreciated having company.

Maybe she was feeling something I recognized in myself.

I’m not going to pretend to know what she was thinking.

But as I sat beside her, I remembered what it felt like to be stuck in a life you no longer recognize.

Stuck in a life you didn’t necessarily choose.

Forced to live a life where your health determined where you could go, what you could do, and how much of the world you could participate in.

A life where you wanted your voice to be heard.

Where you wanted to know you still had enough value to sit at the table and contribute to society.

Dreaming of a life where people would see more of you than whatever was holding you back or disabling you at that moment.

I knew those feelings all too intimately.

And it made me wonder whether, in some small way, she felt some of the same things.

When it was time to leave, her husband offered us cookies or a banana.

We thanked them for their kindness and continued walking.

As we left, Yolanda, one of the women canvassing with me, commented on how my years of experience and personal testimony about Washington County had contributed to the conversation.

And I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Pride.

Not because I’d persuaded anyone.

But because I’d remembered who I was.

The Beauty of a Second Encounter

A little later, as we made our way back toward our vehicles, we passed the same house again.

The couple was standing outside.

She was still in her flowered nightgown, and her husband was beside her, holding onto her clothing to help steady her.

The tenderness between them was beautiful.

Hayden happened to be walking nearby.

I introduced him.

I told him she’d said he was a good-looking young man, and I was sure his wife would agree.

We all laughed, and I added that while his looks might have caught her attention, his intelligence was the real treasure.

I believed Washington County would be proud to elect someone with his knowledge and experience.

She apologized again for her appearance, and I wondered whether meeting this young man had made her feel a little self-conscious.

I glanced back at her and told her again how beautiful she was and that she had absolutely nothing to apologize for.

Her nightgown looked like one of the dresses all the young ladies wear these days.

In my opinion, she was fashionable, beautiful, and amazing.

She giggled.

And I suddenly realized that I was talking to strangers.

Making someone laugh.

Complimenting a stranger because I genuinely wanted her to know how beautiful I thought she was.

With every conversation, it became more apparent.

The woman I’d missed so desperately was returning.

By this point, Hayden had begun speaking with the couple.

That’s the nature of running for political office. He shared his history and his desire to earn their vote, and when he left, they proudly placed his sign in their front yard.

We all went our separate ways.

Looking back, I realize I had no idea that the most difficult part of the morning was still ahead.

–The Swimming Pool–

I chose to move my car to the nearby parking area in front of the subdivision’s swimming pool.

A pool I had inspected for years.

And that’s when memories of the past came flooding back, haunting my present.

I remembered Cody.

A sweet young man who worked for the POA, someone who had always treated me with kindness and respect.

I remembered looking at a pool pump with him one day when a valve opened and sprayed water directly into my face.

He apologized, and I laughed because earlier that same day, I’d been at a septic system when someone struck a line with a shovel, and sewage water erupted like a geyser.

So when that clean pool water hit my face, all I could think was, Thank God it wasn’t sewage.

I laughed, thinking it would be a story to tell my grandchildren someday.

Those were the memories that made me really love the work I did and the community I was proud of.

Those stories were the kind that never made it into inspection reports.

The personal, honest human connections and conversations were bonuses between the responsibilities of the job.

Cody heard my horrible story in 2024.

Then, in 2025, he asked me to open the pool for the season.

The heartache I suffered when I had to explain that I was no longer allowed to do that work broke me even more.

Yet all he said was that he would pray for me.

I’ve only seen him one time in my community since, at the UPS Store.

I pray to this day that he’s thriving because he’s an incredible human being.

As I sat there in that parking lot, I realized how much I missed him.

A wave of grief ran through me.

I deeply missed not just Cody.

I missed all of it.

The people.

The conversations.

The relationships.

The community and the county I had watched grow for over a quarter of a century.

Suddenly, the pride I’d felt only moments earlier was overwhelmed by grief.

And only in that moment did I realize something I hadn’t fully understood before.

Washington County had been like a first child in my heart.

–Grieving the Loss of My Home–

I moved to Washington County in 1980, after my father’s death.

I grew up here.

It’s where I learned about small-town politics, community relationships, and the importance of knowing the people you serve.

My government career allowed me to find something that had been missing from much of my life.

Strength.

Conviction.

Purpose.

Respect for others and, perhaps most importantly, respect for myself.

It allowed me to stop seeing myself as the abused girlfriend, the woman who had been told she wasn’t smart enough, or someone who needed another person to protect her.

It allowed me to become the person who protected other people.

My career allowed me to grow into the woman I’d always deserved to be.

Through it, I gained respect and confidence. I developed relationships that became part of my identity.

My children grew up knowing me as the woman everyone saw as an expert.

And I loved Washington County with everything I had.

Over the years, I watched empty fields become subdivisions.

Swimming pools get built.

I had the honor of witnessing communities become established, families grow, and people age.

For a quarter of a century, through changes in leadership, government policies, and the enormous growth of Northwest Arkansas, I stood alongside them and never wavered.

I cared for Washington County as if it were my own child.

I watched it take its first steps, learn to drive, go off to college, and build a home.

I protected it fiercely, within the laws and responsibilities of my position.

I was proud that I could put aside my own troubles at times to serve the people within its geographical borders.

There were times those interactions were the very things that allowed me to forget what was happening in my own life.

Yet the hardest thing to grieve is the fact that when I was hurt, the work I loved and the relationships that gave me purpose were taken out of my daily life.

In the very community that felt embedded in my DNA.

I wasn’t given even a single opportunity to say goodbye or find closure.

How do you explain that kind of grief to someone else, or the impact it has on your mental health?

How do you explain losing something that is still there, but you’re no longer part of it, even though you never chose to leave?

The people are still there.

The communities are still there.

The swimming pools are still there.

Life went on.

But I wasn’t part of it anymore.

It felt like raising a child, and then suddenly that child was dead.

I know those are difficult words.

But that’s the depth of the loss I felt.

I wasn’t simply grieving a career.

I was grieving the place where I’d learned to believe in me.

I was grieving my home.

–Becoming Unboxed–

Saturday didn’t magically fix my nervous system.

It didn’t erase the fear, the isolation, or the grief.

There were moments when I still needed someone beside me. Moments when I questioned whether I could participate. Moments when my memories became so overwhelming that I struggled to continue.

But I got up.

I went somewhere unfamiliar.

I asked for help when I needed it.

I sat at a table surrounded by people I didn’t know.

I spoke to strangers.

I laughed.

I remembered what it felt like to be respected for what I knew.

And I cried for everything I missed.

But perhaps the most meaningful part of Saturday was meeting a beautiful woman in a flowered nightgown.

A woman who wanted to hear what we had to say.

A woman whose husband stood beside her with such tenderness.

A woman who made me laugh and whose eyes have stayed with me ever since.

I told her I had a blog.

I hope one day to print this story and bring it back to her door.

Not because I need her to know everything I’ve survived.

But because I want her to know what those few moments meant to me.

I went canvassing because I wanted to reconnect with a county I’d spent my life loving.

I didn’t expect to find a piece of myself sitting in a stranger’s living room.

For so long, I’ve been trying to survive until tomorrow.

Now I’m trying to learn how to believe in myself walking into tomorrow.

Maybe becoming unboxed isn’t about returning to the woman I was before.

Maybe it’s about recognizing that the woman I worked so hard to become is still here.

Even with everything she’s carrying.

Washington County was my first child.

And although I may no longer serve it in the way I once did, I never stopped loving it.

I deserve a seat at the table.

Perhaps, for the first time in what feels like an eternity, I’m beginning to believe my life might be different but that is the only way to truly start Becoming Unboxed.

The Gift of Being Selfless

What does it mean to be a good person?

The way I see it, everyone has the capability of being a good person. All it takes is looking outside yourself and seeing the person standing in front of you. Everyone should be equal or greater than your overall sense of self.

It doesn’t take much to be a good human but being a bad one can take everything from someone else.

She Was Only 25

It took me 46 years to see my mother’s grief through the eyes of a mother.

For 46 years, I’ve carried the story of the little girl who lost her daddy.

Tonight, I found myself thinking about the young woman who lost her husband.

I feel as though I have spent most of my life trying to understand and overcome what losing my daddy at six years old meant.

Suddenly, 46 years later, I think I am beginning to understand what losing my daddy must have done to my mom.

She was a widow at 25. She lost her happily ever after.

My dad was only 26, and he left behind a six-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son.

Tonight, I found myself going through a box of memories from February 1980. Things I have held dearly for most of my life. Pictures of the accident, some of my dad’s childhood belongings, and little pieces of a life that ended far too soon.

While I’ve literally had a lifetime to look at these things, tonight, for the first time, I really looked at them. I saw them for what they were.

There were sympathy cards, flower cards, and letters of sympathy from friends and family.

Among those small acts of kindness was the warranty for my daddy’s casket. Even the information about where his burial vault was made.

It was almost as though those things had suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Probably because whenever I opened that storage box, I was always drawn to the things I loved seeing. His Boy Scout uniform, his wallet full of baby pictures, and the newspaper article showing the wadded mess of metal left behind after his 1974 Ford Torino struck four trees at a high rate of speed.

His school pictures, report cards, handwritten letters, and the little pieces of his childhood that my grandparents had saved.

And then there were the Valentine’s cards.

My mother’s handwritten words, “The one you picked, not just came along.”

And my daddy’s simple message, written in his own handwriting.

“I love you. Ed.”

I remember that my daddy bought my mother Dan Fogelberg’s Phoenix on 8-track. He thought 8-tracks were cool. Man, would he wonder at the world today.

On that 8-track was a song called “Longer.”

It was a love song, given to a woman who had no idea how little time she had left with the man who bought it for her.

All of these things I’ve kept for years, but somehow, tonight I saw them differently.

Suddenly, I was no longer looking at the souvenirs of an event I wished I could forget.

I was no longer looking through the innocent eyes of a six-year-old girl who had just lost her daddy.

I was looking through the eyes of a mother.

And for the first time, I could truly see how strong my own mother had to be.

I was mesmerized by her strength.

I can appreciate her more in this moment because I know what it means to have children depending on you when the pain becomes absolutely unbearable and you’re hurting yourself.

You can’t collapse.

You just tell yourself, “It’s fine.”

And you keep going.

It made me think about how incredibly strong she had to be.

All the decisions that had to be made. All the people she had to notify. All the arrangements that had to be handled.

The uncertainty of what the future might bring, or what tomorrow would even look like.

And through all of that, somewhere in the middle of everything, she was supposed to find time to grieve her happily ever after.

She was only 25.

I spent 46 years trying to understand what losing my daddy did to me, never fully considering what losing him must have done to her.

And tonight, surrounded by all those little pieces of paper, I finally saw something I hadn’t seen before.

Now I know where I get my strength from.

Now I know why I’m damned and determined that I will not give up.

I was taught how to fight by a warrior.

She was only 25.

The Art of Healing: Living with Trauma and CPTSD

For Whoever Needs This

If you are reading this because something inside you hurts, I want you to know something.

Maybe the noise won’t stop. Maybe the memories won’t fade. Maybe you are tired of pretending to be okay.

This was not your fault.

You did not deserve it.

And struggling does not make you weak. It means your body fought to keep you alive.

There may not be one cure, one medication, or one answer for all of us. But there is one truth I have learned again and again:

You deserve to be heard long before you feel healed.

If you feel like you’re running a marathon in quicksand, if even the smallest sound makes your heart brace for danger, if you’re afraid that no one will stay beside you when it gets hard, I understand that more than I can ever explain.

Maybe no one can fix you.

Maybe fixing was never the goal.

But please take this with you:

Strength is not never sinking. Strength is refusing to stay buried.

Your voice matters.

Your pain matters.

Your tomorrow matters, even if today hurts.

If nothing else, let these words be proof:

You are not invisible.

I see you.

And I believe you can make it through.

For the Friends and Family of Someone Who Suffers

If you love someone who lives with trauma, you may sometimes feel unsure what to do or be afraid of saying the wrong thing.

You might see them cry without warning.

Pull away when they actually need closeness.

Lash out when they are really just scared.

You may take it personally. You may feel helpless. You may even feel tired too.

Please know this:

They are not choosing their pain.

Their nervous system is reacting for them long before their logic even has a chance to even process the situation.

They are not trying to be difficult.

They are trying to survive.

You don’t need the perfect words.

You don’t need to fix it.

You don’t need all the answers.

Sometimes all they need is:

“I’m here.”

“I don’t fully understand, but I want to support you.”

“You don’t have to carry this alone right now.”

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is stay without trying to change them.

Because it’s not about rescuing them.

It’s about not abandoning them while they’re learning how to rescue themselves.

Even with good intentions, some phrases may cause harm:

“You just need to calm down.”

“Can’t you get over it by now?”

“But that happened years ago.”

“You’re too sensitive.”

“Other people have it worse.”

It may seem logical, but trauma doesn’t respond to logic.

It responds to safety.

To compassion.

To patience.

They are not broken.

They are rebuilding.

And they are still learning how to live in a body that remembers what they wish it could forget.

You may never fully understand what they carry. But if you can choose to walk beside them anyway, even when it’s messy, you will give them something that medicine never could:

Proof that they are still worthy of love and care.

That kind of presence is not weakness.

That is courage.

That is love.

And sometimes, that is what helps a survivor make it to tomorrow.

Part I: What CPTSD Really Is

All the years of abuse. All the traumatic instances. All the ways I had to survive financially, physically, mentally, spiritually, and in relationships.

I always had someone to lean on.

A therapist.

A lifeline.

Someone who could remind me that I was still here.

But the funny irony is this:

The week before it happened, the last time, the one I swore would never happen again, my therapist and I had just spoken.

We talked about how far I had come.

The night of the assault, I called her. I needed her, I knew I was not okay.

She said, “Oh my God, Melissa. You had come so far. You can get through this. You’re strong enough.”

I didn’t want pity.

I didn’t want advice.

I just needed someone to hear me.

As the weeks went on, it was my voice, not her answers, that saved my life.

Just telling someone, anyone, was enough to keep me from the unspeakable end of my existence.

They didn’t need to hear every detail.

They just needed to listen.

But ironically, that also became my downfall.

It was my voice that made someone uncomfortable.

It was my voice that triggered a complaint.

It was my voice they said talked about sex too much.

It was my voice that shattered the silence they depended on.

And my voice, once again, brought back the ugly history of my supervisor, somebody who had already tried to take my worth from me.

That is another chapter.

The nuclear bomb.

The one I haven’t fully written yet.

But when I was diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, everything suddenly made more sense.

And hurt more deeply.

We hear PTSD and we think of soldiers. The ones who come home from war and fear loud noises, sudden movement, fireworks in July.

We think of police officers and firefighters. People who see one horrific moment they can’t forget.

But some of us didn’t witness one moment.

We lived it on a constant basis.

We weren’t on a battlefield.

We were the battlefield.

That’s what people don’t understand about someone like me.

CPTSD is what happens when survival becomes your identity.

It’s when the people who were supposed to keep you safe became the reason you question if you deserve safety at all.

Here is what my war looked like:

A childhood with no positive reflection. No one to say, you’re good just as you are.

The loss of a father at six years old.

A mother who tried, but carried her own storms. Was a widow at 25 with a six year old and 3 year old who suddenly had to become all the things it takes to raise children, keep a house and do it all alone.

The joke about my first kiss that shattered my sense of worth.

A teenage boy who took advantage of my innocence.

Domestic violence wrapped up as love from boyfriends.

Black eyes.

Concussions.

A choice no woman should ever have to make about her own body.

A custody battle to protect my child.

A medical fight to save my daughter life from Type 1 diabetes every single day.

A marriage where I became the protector, the provider, the one who held everything together.

And finally, the detonator.

Sexual assault and entrapment.

And that became the breaking point, creating the flame and  the point of no return.

Followed with discrimination for being a victim by a state agency that exists to protect people like me.

That was the moment the war inside me finally said:

ENOUGH!!!!!

Part II: The Search for Relief

Once you obtain a diagnosis, you begin the next battle:

Trying to find anything that will ease the pain.

You bring the diagnosis to doctors.

To psychiatrists.

You hope that naming it will help fix it.

But naming it is only the beginning.

I was never formally 5150’d or institutionalized, but I’m not going to lie.

There were days when the thought crept in.

Days when I spoke to the professionals who cared for me and said:

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep going like this.”

You find good providers.

You try to find people who care.

You try every medication.

You go through the giant list of antidepressants, every pill that promises relief.

But nothing touches the pain in your mind.

Nothing eases the ache in your bones.

Nothing makes you feel like you again.

When you are deep in the throes of Complex PTSD, you start to forget who “you” even is.

And when you’re also ADHD, your PTSD becomes like the Incredible Hulk climbing the stairs of your nervous system.

You see your psychiatrist every month.

You try one drug after the other.

And at some point, you realize that they know something too.

You may never fully get better.

Not because you don’t want to, but because something new keeps being thrown at you before your body ever gets the chance to heal what came before.

You call hotlines.

You call 988.

You call your advocates at the Rape Crisis Center.

Your friends try.

God knows they try.

But after a while, you start to feel like a burden.

You try to explain it to your family when it’s Christmas.

But something as simple as a normal conversation sends your mind into a tailspin where the only thing that keeps you grounded is lining up colored tiles on a phone screen.

Because if you don’t, you might scream.

And everyone might finally see the demon that trauma and CPTSD has carved into your nervous system.

Part III: When the Treatments Aren’t Enough

When the diagnosis comes, you expect some kind of relief.

But sometimes the diagnosis just opens a door, and behind that door is another kind of exhaustion.

You try ketamine.

You get prescribed rounds of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

Thirty-eight visits.

Nearly thirty-eight days in a row.

Because maybe, just maybe, it will help you breathe again.

The medications don’t work.

Sleep disappears.

And it doesn’t make you weaker, but it makes it impossible to recognize yourself.

In my case, I learned something important:

I didn’t just have trauma.

My trauma got worse after I was discriminated against for being a trauma survivor.

That’s when the closet came.

That’s when I was boxed in a storage room nine hours a day, listening to noise after noise, conversation after conversation, wondering how no one could see I was drowning right in front of them.

I wanted to scream:

Can’t you see me?

Can’t you hear me?

Can’t you feel my pain?

Didn’t you see me vomit in the parking lot?

Didn’t you see the look on my face when I begged to be heard?

But when you have Complex PTSD, you learn something.

No medication stops your mind from convincing itself that it is still in danger.

In my case, even the hum of an aquarium feels like a threat.

A fan running can take away my sleep.

I don’t rest.

I brace.

I don’t hear sound.

I hear warning.

And if anyone were to ask me, how did you survive this?

I would tell them the truth:

My only other option was six feet deep.

That’s the reality no one talks about.

Trauma healing is not a sprint.

It’s a marathon.

And when you have CPTSD, it’s a marathon through quicksand.

What I want the world to understand is this:

I don’t need to be babied.

I don’t need to be treated as fragile.

I just need compassion instead of judgment.

Someone to say:

“I see you. I don’t know what you’re going through. But I care about you.”

It took two years for my family to begin to understand.

My own mother once said, “You need to get over this PTSD shit.”

And then, at a football game, I watched her yell at children for blowing a horn because she knew I couldn’t handle the sound.

Even my ex-husband stepped in one day and said:

“Someone hurt her really badly. Could you please be careful? That’s PTSD.”

It’s not that I need protection.

But someone did hurt me.

The psychiatrist tried.

The medication failed.

And ultimately, it was my voice, my art, and my truth that kept me from disappearing.

Because once the detonator goes off, you will never again be the same person you were before it.

But if you face it, if you use whatever healing you can find, you might come out stronger than you ever were before.

For me, that healing is art.

It is speaking my truth.

It is becoming unboxed.

Part IV: What Strength Really Is

There is no one thing that can fix us all.

No single cure.

No magic word.

No miracle pill.

But there is one thing I have learned, and it might be the only universal truth trauma survivors share:

It was not our fault.

We did not deserve this.

We deserve to be heard.

We did not deserve to be hurt by someone else.

And it is okay to not be okay.

Sometimes daily.

I didn’t get through this alone.

I had medical providers who begged five times for accommodations from the employer who discriminated against me.

They cried with me.

They stood beside me at art exhibits.

They watched me get angry with them and still came back.

That is support.

And sometimes the hardest part is not facing your trauma.

It is apologizing to your children for the moments you lashed out.

Not because you were angry at them, but because the world had been cruel to you and your body didn’t know where else to release the pain.

That is the hardest thing to admit:

This wasn’t their fault either.

So I take it one day at a time.

Sometimes one moment at a time.

Tomorrow I might not be okay.

That doesn’t mean today was a failure.

I cry daily over the tricks my mind plays on me.

Over the feeling that I have lost everyone who once cared.

But there is one thing I hold onto:

The change I make for myself because of what happened to me might become the reason someone else chooses to live.

Maybe that is all I can do.

Maybe that is enough.

People say “you are not alone,” but that is not always true.

Very few people will sit in the quicksand with you and hold your hand while you try to breathe.

But strength isn’t about never sinking.

It’s about refusing to stay buried.

And if I keep using my voice, maybe someone, somewhere, will keep using theirs too.

That is the art of healing.

That is becoming unboxed.

The Voice on the Other End of the Line

One of the hardest things for a trauma survivor to do is reach outside their little bubble.

To move beyond the isolation that has started to feel safe.

To reach for another human being.

Another voice on the other end of the line.

Because after trauma, isolation can become comfortable in a strange way. Not because we necessarily want to be alone, but because being alone can feel safer than risking another misunderstanding, another dismissal, another judgment.

Sometimes healing begins with something that looks incredibly small from the outside.

Picking up the phone.

Sending a message.

Telling someone, “I’m not okay.”

And in the beginning of that journey, we are not expecting anyone to heal us.

We are not expecting another person to make us whole. We are not expecting one conversation, one relationship, one therapist, one medication, or one moment to suddenly make everything better.

Most of the time, we simply need someone willing to sit with us.

To listen.

To hear us.

Because something, someone, or some series of events hurt us deeply enough that, for a while, the expression of what happened may feel like one of the only things we still own.

Our words.

Our memories.

Our anger.

Our grief.

Our questions.

Our version of what happened to us.

Sometimes those expressions are all we have left while we are trying to understand who we are now.

That is why the response of the person on the other end matters so much.

It can take enormous courage to finally speak. And sometimes all it takes is one judgment for everything we have expressed outwardly to turn inward.

Suddenly, we are no longer simply saying, “I am hurting.”

We begin asking ourselves whether our pain means something is wrong with us.

Whether we should be further along.

Whether we are failing at recovery.

Whether what happened damaged us so completely that we will never find our way back to ourselves.

Whether we deserve pity instead of respect.

Whether we have somehow become something that should be judged instead of understood.

That is a tremendous amount of power contained in what can look like an ordinary human interaction.

The people we reach toward cannot heal us.

But their response can influence what happens next.

Whether they listen or dismiss.

Whether they stay or retreat.

Whether they make room for us or try to tell us who we should be.

Those moments can affect whether we are willing to reach outward again.

They can affect how safe connection feels.

They can even shape parts of who we become as we rebuild.

But there is another side to this.

No one person can protect another person from everything.

It simply is not possible.

We can stand beside someone.

We can warn them about danger.

We can try to shield them from pain.

We can carry what we are able to carry.

We can love someone so fiercely that we wish we could stand between them and every hurt, every disappointment, every loss, every sadness.

But we cannot live their life for them.

And sometimes, in trying so hard to protect someone we love, we unintentionally stand between them and something they need.

The chance to see clearly.

The chance to make their own choices.

The chance to discover what they are capable of.

The chance to decide what happiness looks like for them.

Protection can come from love.

But so can standing beside someone while allowing them to face what is theirs to face.

Because ultimately, most human beings are searching for many of the same things.

We want to be heard.

We want connection.

We want purpose.

We want some measure of happiness and productivity and the freedom to build a life that feels fulfilling to us.

The American ideal speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But happiness has never meant the same thing for everyone.

The clerk standing behind the counter at Dollar General may be every bit as content with their life as the millionaire sitting at the head of Walmart.

And either one can also be profoundly unhappy.

Money cannot tell us.

Titles cannot tell us.

Houses, accomplishments, jobs, and status cannot tell us what fulfillment looks like inside another human being.

And neither can we.

Maybe that is part of what we owe one another.

Not the promise that we can remove every painful thing from someone’s life.

Not the belief that we know what their happiness should look like.

Not the need to rescue, fix, or rewrite them.

Maybe what we owe one another is much simpler.

To listen.

To make room for another person’s expression without immediately turning it into a weakness, a failure, a diagnosis, or a judgment.

To trust that another human being knows something about their own life that we cannot possibly know for them.

To stand beside them without trying to become the author of their story.

There is a difference between saying,

“I will keep everything from touching you,”

and saying,

“Whatever happens, you will not have to face it alone.”

Friday Night Lights


Friday Night High school Football

I am here to support my son and his team on a beautiful fall evening. It feels almost surreal that nearly a year ago today, I could sit in these stands without trembling. Back then, I could feel the thud of the players’ feet, the sway of the bleachers, the contagious energy of youth—and still breathe without flinching.

I didn’t know then how sacred that internal calm had been. Back then, I just stayed somewhat numb to avoid the pain.

Now, every sound has a sharp edge. Every rhythm has a painful point my body still doesn’t know how to process it. The air hums with a tension that is somewhat unexplainable. A child keeps blowing a moose horn. I am sure they probably mean for it to distract the other team. Unfortunately for me, each blast feels like it’s aimed straight at my nervous system.

The Farmington High School Cardinals’ home field glows under the Friday night lights. In celebration of every touchdown, fireworks split the dark Ozark sky. They’re breathtaking against the untouched hills that form the backdrop of the stadium. The gentle rolling hills, full of natural beauty, still hide the stadium from the glare of city lights.

Yet for me, every explosion feels like an assault on my senses.

Gabe is a junior and not the starter. This is okay, because time moves like the blink of an eye. This is his last season as the low man on the totem pole. A place almost every adult who has played a sport remembers. With eight minutes left in the second quarter, our team is winning.

It is one of those moments when, as a parent, you find yourself hoping: Maybe he’ll get a chance to play but also realizing that this is someone else’s last season to shine.

After COVID, he found his love for football. When he was little, his autism made sports hard. We tried soccer and baseball. Instead of watching the batter, he would pick flowers in the outfield. Instead of kicking the soccer ball, he would follow the butterfly and go the other way.

So for him to thrive in football last year was incredible. I got to watch him come alive on the field. I got to watch my son find something that lit him up.

That was the first fall after the assault. I was already hypervigilant, but I could still gently calm myself enough to enjoy the energy of the crowd.

Then my employer force-transferred me into a confined, dark, cold closet.

After that, I developed a new kind of fear: agoraphobia.

Now I hear everything.

Every whisper. Every scrape. Every creak.

My ears became too alive, my body too aware. Even now, the faintest sound—a water bottle crinkling, a pen clicking—can feel like a warning:

Danger is near.

Friday night lights Farmington Cardinal Statium


Every touchdown brings another firework, another surge of beauty and panic intertwined. I watch colors bloom across the dark horizon, and I flinch anyway. The crowd cheers, and then the announcer plays “Kickstart My Heart.”

That song came out when I was in high school—when the world still felt wide open and loud in a good way. Hearing it now makes time fold in on itself, my youth and my son’s overlapping in the glow of the Friday night lights. In my mind, I can almost see the girl I was in those stands, laughing and carefree, unaware of what life would take and what it would teach.

The song’s the same, but I’m not.

Now it hits differently much louder somehow, as if it’s reminding me that my son is growing up inside the same rhythm that once carried me, and I’m fighting to stay steady enough to witness it.

My heart won’t stop. My mind won’t stop.

It feels like fighting a mental battle with the cancer of my memories—something that grows inside me without permission, spreading through nerves and thoughts alike. Surviving it feels like chemotherapy for the soul: exhausting, brutal, but necessary if I ever want to live again.

I look out onto the field and notice a girl with green cat-ear headphones snapping pictures of the team. I assume they are for the yearbook. Even though her ears are adorably covered, I notice that she, too, flinches when the fireworks burst.

I wonder if maybe she understands, or maybe she’s simply doing her job. Somehow, the reason doesn’t matter. Noticing her reaction steadies me. It reminds me that I may not be the only one enduring the noise in order to capture something that matters.

When the crowd gets too loud, I retreat to the concession stand and then find myself slipping beneath the bleachers to hide my tears from the world.

I know I am here because I love my son. I also refuse to let fear win.

Mind you, I know every part of me wants to go home. But I choose to stay, even while trembling, breathing too fast, and sick to my stomach. I remind myself that this moment matters.

Fighting through it matters.

Making moments become larger than pain matters.

I know trauma isn’t invisible; it’s physical. The symptoms I experience live in my bones, my pulse, in the way every nerve hums with false alarms. I carry it like a chronic illness—the cancer of memory that threatens to consume what’s left of my peace.

But I keep fighting, even if survival looks nothing like healing.

Tonight, I’m not whole. I’m not calm.

But I’m here.

I’m showing up in a place that once felt safe, even though it still hurts to inhabit. That, for now, is enough.

And as I look around, I wonder how many others are missing these moments.

It is not because they don’t care or because they don’t love deeply. I can promise you that is definitely not the case. The reason is much more complicated. Trauma or anxiety is stealing their sense of safety.

Maybe they’re sitting in parked cars outside stadiums or in dark rooms at home, wishing they could be there but unable to bear the noise from the internal alarm system trauma created.

One can only hope that maybe one day showing up won’t feel like survival for anyone who is suffering. Maybe one day the sun will set on our pain long enough for the celebration to feel like living.

Healing must be conducted personally, but suffering should never have to be.

I want others to know they are truly not sitting in the stands alone.

I am right there next to you.

Let’s move toward healing together.

The Scream They Never Heard

I want to scream.

I want to yell.

I want to curse at the people who hurt me.

I want to physically fight back in the way that, mentally, I can’t.

I want to look those who tormented me straight in the eye and say:

How could you do this to me?

I am hurting and in shock.

Frustrated.

Mentally collapsing.

And angry, oh so very angry.

I don’t mean the kind of anger that comes and goes.

I mean the kind of anger that hides under your skin.

The kind hidden beneath the outward professionalism, the polite emails, and the carefully chosen words.

Underneath every please and thank you I typed to those responsible who tried so hard to make me invisible.

Underneath every morning that required every ounce of strength I had just to show up and walk back through those doors.

I walked into work every morning as the victim of a sexual assault that had occurred during my lunch break—during my workday.

And there was the irony of walking into a public health facility, a center charged with protecting woman’s health and offering them support at some of life’s most vulnerable moments.

Think about that contradiction for a minute.

I worked for an agency connected to resources for domestic violence, human trafficking, mental health crises and suicide prevention—the agency responsible for answering the 988 crisis line in the state of Arkansas.

988.

The number you are told to call when you feel like you have nothing left to live for.

And I worked there.

I walked through the employee entrance barely able to remember who I was.

Maybe I simply wasn’t as important because I was an employee.

It felt as though employee health and comfort didn’t matter at least not mine.

All I was expected to do was get the job done and leave.

I still had a computer.

I could still type.

I could still answer emails.

I could still say good morning.

Sometimes I could even make my voice sound normal.

They thought because I showed up I must have been okay.

Or maybe it was because I wouldn’t leave maybe that was the true issue.

But I  was NOT okay!!

There were times I could barely remember my own name, let alone remember how to care for myself.

How do you explain that?

How do you explain being a grown woman who had spent decades working, raising children, solving problems, paying bills, fixing houses, caring for every other person and handling whatever life threw at her and then suddenly having to fight to remember things that used to happen automatically?

Eat.

Shower.

Pay the bill.

Find the keys.

Answer the message.

Remember what day it is.

Remember why you walked into the room.

Remember the sentence you were trying to finish.

Remember who you were before all of this happened.

My brain couldn’t manage a life anymore.

It could only manage surviving minutes at a time.

Yet somehow, I still kept showing up.

Maybe that was the part that fooled everyone.

But my  medical team help me tried to get help.

Even when complete mental collapse felt all but imminent, all five tried.

I saw my psychiatrist every month.

I went to two different therapists every week.

I saw my chiropractor weekly, and even my chiropractor wanted to help with accommodation paperwork because he could see what was happening to me.

My general practitioner tried.

My endocrinologist tried.

My therapists tried.

My psychiatrist tried.

I had five different medical professionals submit requests for ADA accommodations on my behalf.

They could see something was terribly wrong.

And it wasn’t only medical professionals.

I could tell an ordinary person what had happened without giving them graphic details.

I didn’t have to describe the deer blind.

I didn’t have to describe what happened to my body.

I could simply say:

I was sexually assaulted during my lunch break.

Afterward, I was moved from the work I had send almost half my life conducting, then moved again, and eventually I spent nine months working in a windowless room while trying to get help for what was happening to me.

Their faces would change.

Oh my God.

I am so sorry.

It was almost instinctual—the empathetic side of a stranger.

A human being hears that another human being was hurt.

A human being responds with compassion, empathy and concern.

It isn’t complicated.

They didn’t need medical records to believe me.

They didn’t need lawyers or discovery to prove to them what had happened.

They didn’t need an accommodation committee.

They didn’t need to understand Complex PTSD.

They didn’t need every detail.

They simply needed to listen long enough to hear my pain and suffering and understand:

Something terrible happened to her.

Normal human empathy.

That was the thing that seemed to be withheld from me.

Now mind you, I didn’t stay silent.

I wrote state representatives.

I wrote legislators.

I wrote to the Governor’s office.

I filed Equal Opportunity charges.

I hired lawyers.

My medical providers sent letters and filled out forms.

My therapists asked questions.

My attorney asked questions.

I asked questions.

I asked the Arkansas ACLU.

I reached out to disability organizations.

I begged.

I pleaded.

Everybody seemed to be asking questions.

And yet what reached me almost every time seemed to be the exact same thing:

Silence.

Or what seemed to be the same nonexistent answer.

Don’t talk about that.

Be quiet.

Move on.

Almost every accommodation request seemed to arrive at the same conclusion.

There were discussions about whether I would be put back somewhere.

About whether working from home might continue for a very long time.

About what would happen to me.

There seemed to be endless discussion about me.

But one question felt painfully absent:

What do you think would help you?

What environment would allow you to function?

What would make you feel safe enough to concentrate?

What do you think an accommodation looks like?

I didn’t expect to get everything I wanted.

But I should have had a seat at the table and the option to look through the menu.

I wanted to participate in the conversation about my own survival.

Instead, other people were deciding.

Other people determining where I should be.

Other people determining what should happen next.

Other people deciding what was best for me.

Other people talking about my body, my work, my future and my trauma while I was struggling to hear my own voice.

It was a feeling that was painfully familiar.

Again, after two men had used my body without listening to my voice repeatedly say:

No.

A lifetime of other people telling me what they wanted.

What my body should do for them.

What I should tolerate.

Who I should be.

Where I should go.

What I should accept.

What was best for me.

It became the relative movie role the narrative I had heard all too often throughout my life:

Be obedient.

Don’t stand up.

You are weak.

You don’t matter.

And the message from my employer felt painfully familiar.

Different circumstances. Different people. Different actions.

But once again, other people were determining what would happen to me while my own voice seemed to matter the least.

Except this time the damage became so severe that the numbing darkness grew louder than everything else.

Eventually, my own voice became almost impossible to hear.

The effects began showing themselves in symptoms and medically supported diagnoses.

Then there were days inside that windowless room my employer put me in when my mind became so desperate to understand what prolonged powerlessness was doing to me that I asked myself a question I had almost been afraid to admit:

Is this what a concentration camp was like?

I knew my experience was not equivalent to the imprisonment, torture, starvation, murder and atrocities endured by victims of concentration camps.

That wasn’t the comparison I was trying to make.

I was trying to somehow rationalize what it felt like to be psychologically captive—to feel trapped inside circumstances I could not control, constantly asking for help while feeling as though no one was listening.

My mind was searching desperately for language large enough to understand what prolonged powerlessness was doing to it.

What happens to a human being when she feels powerless for long enough?

What happens when choice begins disappearing?

What happens when dignity and worth are forced?

What happens when your world becomes smaller and smaller until you no longer feel like a person moving through life, but something being contained and managed?

I didn’t have language big enough to express it or fight off the growing darkness.

The word stress wasn’t big enough.

No, anxiety wasn’t big enough.

No, depression wasn’t big enough.

Sometimes even the word trauma didn’t feel big enough.

I felt dehumanized.

I felt managed.

I felt as though something fundamental had been taken from me, and I could not figure out how to get it back.

And the rage underneath my pain was just as enormous.

Because other people got to go home from their days work.

They could rest.

Recoup.

Recharge themselves.

Eat dinner.

Watch television.

Laugh.

Sleep.

Wake up.

Live.

My mind didn’t get an opportunity. My trauma filled me home. It followed me in every corner of every room 24 hours a day. My nervous system didn’t realize it could rest. It couldn’t stop preparing for another fight.

No matter how hard I fought to get myself back, back to a version I thought I once was,  I basically had to fight and  try to remember how to be a person at all.

How could they do this to me?

How could they watch me deteriorate and still expect me to perform?

How could I tell them I was drowning from the fallout of a violent crime and somehow become the problem because I couldn’t breathe?

How could medical professionals tell them again and again that I needed help, and their response still feel like silence?

I wanted them to look at me.

Really look.

Not as an employee.

Not as a complaint.

Not as an accommodation request.

Not as a problem that needed to be managed.

Me.

LOOK AT ME.

I am one of those people you have policies to save.

I am one of those people you hope will tear a strip of the paper hidden behind the door in the bathroom stall.!

I could barely think.

I could barely sleep.

I could barely take care of myself.

I no longer recognized myself, and you still expected me to act normal?

The worst flashbacks were not always memories of what happened to me in that deer blind or through the employment discrimination.

The worst moments were due to realing  what was happening to my children while I was having a complete mental collapse.

Because the damage didn’t stay at work.

It came home.

The numbing darkness began to swallow my entire family.

Each of my children processed my pain differently during my darkest times.

My daughter had just turned twenty when this began.

As I deteriorated, she became more distant.

Colder.

Almost unable to feel what was happening to me, allowing herself to slowly internalize her own pain alone.

And for a long time, that hurt.

Oh God, it hurt.

Because she had always needed me to be strong.

She had needed me to help her with her health issues, to remember the important things, to be the person who held things together.

But I also knew she needed something I couldn’t give her anymore.

She was surviving it too.

The opposite occurred with my son.

He was thirteen when this began.

He is sixteen now.

He had always been a handful.

A child who could challenge me, frustrate me, exhaust me and make me laugh, sometimes within the same five minutes.

But during those years, he became the child who saw the darkest parts of me over and over again.

He saw my darkness in public settings.

He learned how to read my facial expressions.

He noticed when a room became too much for me and instantly checked whether I needed reassurance or protection.

He heard my speech patterns change.

Which is terribly painful to even acknowledge.

My son became fluent in my childlike dialect.

My mind became metaphorically small.

Something inside my brain had fractured in a way that made the adult part of me harder and harder to reach, and somehow my son learned to interpret what it meant.

My nervous system became so incapable of regulation that the smallest thing would and often did become enormous.

This was the downward spiral of a total internal system collapse.

A noise.

A question.

Something misplaced.

One more demand when my brain had absolutely nothing left to give.

Sometimes I would react like an infant having a tantrum because the adult part of me simply could not reach the controls fast enough to turn down the noise.

I couldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t regulate myself.

I couldn’t control any of my emotions that once would have passed through me without taking over the entire room.

And my son lived inside that with me more than anyone.

Sometimes this caused fits of rage in which I would explode toward anyone within the blast zone because my nervous system was at peak fight-or-flight.

The smallest thing would feel enormous, and once my body crossed that threshold, I could not always reach the part of myself that knew how to calm down before it switch was thrown.

There were times my son would curl himself into a ball and cry because his mother could not calm herself enough to make him feel safe while I screamed with uncontrollable anger.

That memory destroys me the most and cuts deep.

My temper tantrum caused my own child to curl into himself, sobbing with his arms around his knees.

He was supposed to be the child.

Instead, there were moments when he became frighteningly close to a parent to me.

He watched me.

He studied me.

He learned my fear.

He experienced moments when the woman who was supposed to regulate the room could no longer regulate herself.

My daughter protected herself by moving away emotionally.

My son protected me by moving closer and becoming the adult.

Neither of them should have needed a survival strategy for their own mother.

But they did.

People at work saw me continue showing up.

My children saw what came home.

While everyone was debating what I was entitled to at work, my children were paying the price at home.

And eventually something changed inside me.

The fear did not disappear.

The anger did not disappear.

I simply became too exhausted to keep feeling all of it.

Day after day, nothing seemed to get anyone’s attention.

Another letter.

Another provider.

Another question.

Another explanation.

Another attempt to make somebody understand.

And every time hope seemed to appear from behind a darkness, giving just enough light to believe that perhaps this person would finally hear me, it seemed to collapse again.

And again.

And again.

Eventually even hope became exhausting.

And I drifted farther and farther into what I can only describe as:

The oblivion of numbness.

It was a darkness many trauma survivors know.

It isn’t sadness.

It isn’t even fear.

It is something beyond both.

It is what happens when your nervous system has screamed for so long that eventually there is nothing left to scream with.

Feeling becomes too expensive.

All feeling equals pain.

So your body begins shutting the lights off.

You stop crying because crying requires feeling.

You stop getting angry because anger requires energy.

You stop imagining tomorrow because tomorrow requires hope.

You breathe.

You go to work.

You answer the email.

You come home.

You stare at the people you love and intellectually know that you love them while wondering why you cannot reach the feeling that once came so naturally.

That was when the darkness almost controlled it all.

I wasn’t simply disappearing.

Little by little, I already had.

And the darkness had all but gained control.

The darkness didn’t only take away my ability to feel.

It convinced me that I deserved everything that had happened to me.

That may have been the most dangerous part.

Because once I could no longer feel my own worth clearly, everything painful that had ever happened became evidence against me.

Maybe I am the reason.

Maybe every bad decision proves it.

Maybe all these people treated me this way because there is something about me that makes people do this.

If it happened again and again, surely the common denominator must be me.

The darkness collected everything.

Every failed relationship.

Every person I trusted who hurt me.

Every time I stayed too long.

Every time I didn’t leave quickly enough.

Every time I didn’t stand up and demand I be valued.

Every bad decision.

Every mistake.

Every moment when I reacted terribly because I was overwhelmed.

And it whispered:

See? It has to be you.

I could fight everybody else to prove that what happened to me mattered while privately wondering whether I deserved to matter at all.

I could fight relentlessly for myself while not believing in myself.

Those things somehow existed at the same time.

I wrote.

I documented.

I asked.

I begged.

I found doctors.

I found therapists.

I contacted representatives.

I filed charges.

I filed lawsuits.

I kept trying to make someone hear me.

But there was one person I could no longer convince that I really deserved to be heard at all.

Me.

The only voice I could no longer hear was my own.

Even now, my body sometimes reminds me how deep that went.

I can be standing safely in my own yard trying to process all of this when my body begins to shake.

My stomach hurts.

My nervous system reacts before my mind knows what happened.

A squirrel drops a nut in front of me.

I startle.

I turn and yell up at it.

Then I hear myself.

That voice.

Small.

Frightened.

Childlike.

For just a moment I hear the six-year-old I once was, the little girl who had already experienced too much before she ever turned seven.

I am standing in my own yard.

I know where I am.

I know I’m an adult.

I know there is no threat.

I know it was a squirrel dropping a nut.

My mind knows.

My body answers first anyway.

The calendar keeps moving.

My body sometimes doesn’t.

And suddenly I understand again what my children heard.

They heard the child inside their mother before I ever knew she was speaking.

They watched me become frightened by things that made no sense to them.

They watched me struggle to explain my involuntary reactions that did not make sense and was unable to stop.

They saw the person who had spent her entire life taking care of everyone else become someone who sometimes could not figure out how to take care of herself.

And that is hardest thing  to forgive myself for occuring..

Even knowing everything I know and understand now.

Even understanding what trauma can do and how painfully hard healing is

Even understanding what chronic hyperarousal and sleep deprivation were doing to me.

There is still a mother inside me who looks backward and thinks:

You hurt your children.

And the darkness takes that thought and tries to turn it into something larger.

See?

It was always you.

Maybe you deserved all of it.

Maybe everybody was right.

Maybe the reason you can’t hear your own voice is because your voice never mattered.

And that is where I went.

That far.

I didn’t know how I was going to get out.

I didn’t know whether there was an out.

I wasn’t looking for someone to solve my entire life.

I wasn’t asking anyone to erase what happened.

I wasn’t asking my employer to become my therapist.

I needed accommodation.

I needed help.

I needed enough human kindness for someone to recognize that a human being was deteriorating and ask:

What can we do to stop making this worse?

I needed enough room to breathe long enough to hear my own voice again.

But by then, I wasn’t sure I would recognize it if it came back.

This is how far down I went.

That was the darkness.

And maybe that is why they never heard my desperate, blood-curdling scream.

Because the loudest scream of my life never came out of my mouth.

At first, it screamed inside me over and over:

How could you do this to me?

Then I became too numb even to scream.

And eventually, underneath everybody else’s voices, everyone else’s decisions, everyone else’s expectations and everyone else’s version of what was best for me—

I can no longer hear my own voice.

Only the weeping of the deeply lost little girl inside me.